Alberta is going through another round of curriculum redesign. The teachers are opposed, in part because of the extra work in changing their lesson plans. In a bigger part, the teachers are not much involved in this re-design and feel disenfranchised.

Circa 1980, Alberta Education did away with phonics and tried to teach reading with the "whole word" approach. I believe other jurisdictions across Canada and USA went this way.

The result was, when these kids were entering university, they were not prepared as well for the textbooks. The Alberta universities were complaining.

Alberta Education then went back to teaching phonics. But a decade of students had poorer reading skills than the previous decade.

It seemed some education guru sold Alberta and a few other jurisdictions about a new approach. In hindsight, that approach must have had poor or no research behind it.

Not only that, Alberta (and a few other jurisdictions) dove in the deep water immediately, based on (in hindsight) some crackpot theory.

And then Alberta obviously did very little monitoring of reading skills. BIGGEST MISTAKE! This error could have been discovered in three or four years. I suspect the experience teachers knew things were going wrong, but had no say. So the mistake festered and compounded.

This is gross mismanagement. Another example of why we need a new system of governance.